Measuring The Technology Level Of Export Products And Analyzing Its Decisive Factors

What really important for a country's long-term economic growth is not"how much"it exports, but"what"it exports, that is to say the quality and technology structure of the export products is more important. The increase of the technology level of export products is an expressing form of export structure optimization, is related to the economic growth closely. We re-calculate the technology level of export products index of 171 countries in 1992-2006, and research the decisive factor of the technology level of export products.We learn the method of building index from Hausmann,Hwang,Rodrik(2007), re-calculate the technology level of export products index of 171 countries in 1992-2006, and we find that the index of all the samples increased in the sample period. We use 65 countries'data from 1992 to 2006 to research empirically, we study the relationship between generalized factor endowment and exports technology level; we find that a country's capital-labor ratio, education, R&D, FDI, import and scale(the number of enterprises who engages in new product development) all have positive impact on improving a country's technology level of export products, but rich nature resource isn't good for increase the technology level of the export products, that is to say there is"nature resource curse". We divide the 65 countries into middle-high income countries and middle-low income countries, the result shows that the positive impact of capital-labor ratio on promoting the technology level of export products in middle-high countries is higher, there is"nature resource curse"is more serious in middle-low countries, in middle-low income countries the expenditure of R&D doesn't have obvious impact on raising the technology level of export products, the impact of education, FDI and import is more obvious in middle-low countries. We study the relationship of trade structure variable and technology level of export products too, we find increasing the percentage of products on high technology level in total import and the percentage of intra-industry trade in total trade can both increase a country's technology level of export products, higher percentage of primary products in total import and the export concentration level both have negative impact on the promotion of a country's technology level of export products, we compare the result of middle-low income countries and middle-high income countries and we find that both middle-low income countries and middle-high income countries can benefit from importing products on high technology level and carrying on intra-industry trade,either middle-low nor middle-high countries can promote their technology level of export products by importing primary products, higher export concentration index has more significantly negative impact in middle-low countries. Finally, according to the results, we provide relative policy suggestions for China on how to promote the technology level of export products.